"Each generation, coming out of obscurity, must define its mission and fulfill or betray it." Frantz Fanon - The Wretched of the Earth James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership. {r}evolution

Our mission is to nurture the transformational leadership capacities of individuals and organizations committed to creating productive, sustainable, ecologically responsible, and just communities. Through local, national and international networks of activists, artists and intellectuals we foster new ways of living, being and thinking to face the challenges of the 21st century.

Truth & Reconciliation in Greensboro, North Carolina

In early November 1979, a group of American Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members opened fire on a labor and civil rights march in Greensboro, N.C., killing five people and wounding 10 others. Twice, all-white juries acquitted the six Klansman and Nazis brought to trial. Outrage, fear, confusion and pain enveloped the city like a dark cloud. A federal civil suit filed in 1985 found the local police, Klan and Nazis liable of one wrongful death in the Greensboro Massacre. But it was too little, too late.

The Rev. Nelson Johnson, then a community activist, led that civil rights march back in 1979, and over the ensuing decades he struggled to find a way to bring healing to a city still seething. “The question was: Wow do we engage this part of our culture that has now become its own kind of cancer?” he recalls.

Nelson began to rethink his approach to activism. “I grappled deeply with my understanding of social change – what I had been doing and how I had been doing it.” After attending seminary, he and his wife Joyce founded the Faith Community Church in a rundown Greensboro neighborhood.

Embracing Martin Luther King Jr.’s concept of the “beloved community” – its belief in forgiveness, inclusiveness and the capacity for personal transformation – the Johnsons formed the Beloved Community Center and opened its doors to those in need. The center reached out to the homeless, to those caught up in gangs and drugs, and to struggling service groups.

Building on their work with the Beloved Community Center, Nelson and Joyce embarked on a five-year effort to create a truth and reconciliation commission to reexamine the Greensboro Massacre. Local resistance was persistent; the Greensboro City Council rejected the idea and refused to participate. Others were suspicious of the Johnsons’ intent.

But in 2004 the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission effectively transformed the city of 230,000 into a civil rights experiment. Thousands attended public hearings, religious services, conferences and artistic performances. Discussion groups, Internet blogs and call-in shows engaged residents directly. Klansmen and Nazis met in the same rooms as surviving family members of those killed in the massacre.

Former Nazi Roland Wayne Woods came forward to say he had killed a demonstrator. Asked why he had committed the murder, Woods said he had been mixed up, full of hate and rage, and then took full responsibility. “We all cried that day,” Nelson remembers.

After two years of testimony and public debate, the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission issued 29 recommendations – some sweeping, some specific – to the City Council and public. Beyond North Carolina, the Johnsons are aiming to facilitate truth and reconciliation projects nationwide, “opening up a new future for us all.”

ON Being Krista Tippet

ON Being Krista Tippet
January 19, 2012
We travel to Detroit to meet the civil rights legend Grace Lee Boggs. We find the 96-year-old philosopher surrounded by creative, joyful people and projects that defy more familiar images of decline. It's a kind of parallel urban universe with much to teach all of us about meeting the changes of our time.
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Boggs Center 3061 Field St. Detroit, MI 48214

James and Grace Lee boggs Center To Nurture community Leadership
hpp//www.boggscenter.org / {r}evolution - the two side non-violent revolution in values.
The Boggs Center was founded in 1995 by friends and associates of James Boggs (1919 -1993) and Grace Lee Boggs (1915 - ) to honor and continue their legacy as movement activists and theoreticians.
Our aim is to help grassroots activists develop themselves into visionary leaders and critical thinkers who can devise proactive strategies for rebuilding and respiriting our cities and rural communities from the ground up, demonstrate the power of ideas in changing ourselves, our reality, and demystify leadership.